1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of web services. More specifically, the present invention relates to multi-protocol support for web services.
2. Description of the Related Art
The field of Web Services involves the creation and utilization of software systems designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine operation over a network (typically the World Wide Web, hence the name “Web Services”). There are a variety of different protocols utilized by various Web Services vendors and customers when operating these web services. Three of the most common Web Services protocols are Simple Object Access protocol (SOAP), Representational State Transfer (REST), and Extensible Markup Language Remote Procedure Call (XML-RPC).
In SOAP, XML-based messages are exchanged, typically using HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The use of XML can be both a benefit and a drawback. Its format is easy for humans to read and understand, but it can create slow processing times and the extra XML wrapper around every request and response can create bandwidth issues. Additionally, the use of SOAP requires the knowledge of a new XML specification, and many developers will need a SOAP toolkit to form requests and parse the results. In spite of these drawbacks, SOAP is currently the most commonly used Web Services protocol.
In REST, a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is utilized for the messaging. The most common type of URI is a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), which many users will recognize as the data located in a web address field of an Internet browser. For example, http://www.brokerage.com/quote?symbol=QQQ may be a URI in the REST protocol for issuing a request for a stock quote. REST has the advantage of the fact that any developer can figure out how to create and modify a URI to access different web services. The major disadvantage of REST is security, in that is can be dangerous to provide sensitive information as parameters in a URI. Despite this limitation, REST has been gaining momentum in comparison to SOAP.
XML-RPC is a predecessor of SOAP. Despite numerous improvements made by SOAP over XML-RPC, XML-RPC is still in use in many systems simply because many vendors have been slow to adopt newer protocols, a common occurrence in the computer industry.
Since it is common to see many different protocols utilized in various web services, it would be beneficial to provide a way for a single web service to be easily utilized by users familiar with any of the web services protocols, as opposed to limiting access to a particular web service to only those users familiar with the one particular protocol utilized by the web service.
In the past, the solution to this problem has been to provide different versions of the same web service for the various protocols. For example, the aforementioned stock quote web service might be implemented with a SOAP version, a REST version, and an XML-RPC version, and the user can simply select which version to access. This solution, however, requires additional programming and wastes resources. What is needed is a solution that avoids the drawbacks of the prior art.